[3] Staats was a member of the Cosmos and Chevy Chase Clubs and the Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church of Washington, DC.

Staats left government service for a year after the Eisenhower presidential transition, and during most of 1953 he served as research director for Marshall Field & Company.

On February 11, 1966, President Johnson nominated Staats for the position of Comptroller General, which also involves serving as head of the GAO.

As Comptroller General, Staats drew on his many years of government experience, including as a former Deputy Director of the Bureau of the Budget under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, as he led GAO during a period of change and national turmoil.

Within GAO, he practiced a participatory management style, often relying on task forces to study job processes and organizational issues.

[5] Staats focused on improving GAO's internal planning processes and on expanding its work and issue areas to more effectively serve the Congress.

When Staats took charge of GAO in 1966, less than ten percent of the total effort of its professional staff went toward providing direct assistance to the Congress.

In 1970, the Bureau of the Budget and GAO agreed on the formation of a government auditing standards task force, which undertook a lengthy research and drafting process.

As a result of the work of the task force, the Comptroller General issued in 1972 the first edition of the Standards for Audit of Governmental Organizations, Programs, Activities & Functions, which came to be known as the "Yellow Book."

In later years, GAO gave the book a more concise title, Government Auditing Standards, and updated its guidance periodically.

In addition to issuing guidance to help state and local auditors, the Comptroller General played a key role in establishing intergovernmental audit forums in the 1970s.

These changes generally reflected the shift to program evaluation, the emergence of a host of new foreign and domestic problems, and Congress's increasing assertiveness in its relationships with the executive branch.

Staats provided effective leadership as GAO strove to meet the new challenges, as he was widely respected in the Congress and in the government as a whole.

[6] After serving as Comptroller General, Staats became the president and later chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation until his death in 2011.

He was chairman of the Conference on the Public Service, Brookings Institution (1958–60), and during 1979-80 he was a member of the Committee for the National Congress on Church-Related Colleges and Universities.

Staats was named an honorary member of the National Security Industrial Association and elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 1981.